Spud!

My first honest reaction to Spud! was confusion about what decade I'd stumbled into. Originally released in 1996 and ported to Steam in 2015 with no meaningful modernisation, this is a point-and-click first-person adventure built around a gimmick the developer called "Super-Lookaround-O-Vision", pre-rendered 360-degree panoramic scenes that let you rotate your view in all directions from a fixed node. Think Myst, but if someone had replaced the brooding atmosphere with a gun-toting mutant reindeer and a villain named Doctor Chillblane. The premise has you, Spud, trekking across a world of pixie mines, penguin villages, submarines, and eventually Hell itself, trying to rescue your grandfather and his magical toy-making machine. Yes, that is the actual plot, and it commits to its own absurdity completely. The core gameplay loop is classic item-hunt point-and-click. You move by clicking between nodes, gather weird inventory items, and combine or deploy them to get past the equally weird cast of characters blocking your path. There are over 200 locations spread across the adventure, which is a genuinely generous amount of content for the asking price. The inventory system lets you combine toys and creatures, elves, rabbits, the odd imp, to construct solutions to puzzles. When this logic clicks, it lands with the satisfying illogic of the best 90s adventure games. When it doesn't, you're pixel-hunting across pre-rendered frames that are, to be blunt, quite heavily pixellated by any modern standard. Here is where the honest accounting starts. Spud! carries its original bugs into the Steam release largely intact. Freezes and sudden shutdowns were reported in the original DOS era and that instability has not been fully exorcised. Save often using the in-game imp mechanic, and save in multiple slots, because the game will not always warn you before putting Spud in a lethal situation. Certain wrong moves trigger instant death cutscenes, then dump you back at the menu. For players used to modern checkpointing, this will be a jarring readjustment. The visuals, charming in a grimy cartoon-cel way, ask you to do a lot of squinting. What Spud! does exceptionally well, and what the mixed Steam reviews tend to undervalue, is personality. The voice characterisation for its roster of bizarre NPCs lands more often than it misses, and the writing has a genuinely British comedy scrappiness to it. The locations are imaginative and the willingness to go completely off-genre into surreal horror territory mid-Christmas-adventure is the kind of tonal confidence that a lot of current indie games lack. If you played things like Normality or early Discworld adventures and wished they were stranger and buggier, this sits in that orbit. Bottom line: Spud! is for retro adventure enthusiasts who rate atmosphere and oddness over polish, and who do not mind detective work on a walkthrough when the puzzle logic goes fully opaque. Go in expecting a curio, not a comfort experience.

Alex · Scout Team

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